It’s something we had to write at Uni, I wrote this ages ago, blah blah blah… I actually interviewed my mother to find out about the subjects in this piece. It was quite difficult for her to talk about and I’m not sure I should have asked in the first place.
My mother first tried to run away from home when she was eight. She and her elder brother Lenny had had enough of working in their dad’s shop, so they decided to call it quits.
As Lenny scrambled onto the roof of their Dalston home, my eight year old mother realised a major flaw in their plan: siblings. Her younger sister Helen wouldn’t be able to keep up and Lisa was just a baby. There was no way she could hold two children and a bag of nappies. Still, she couldn’t leave them behind.
She would have to stay and watch her brother escape.
As it transpired Lenny couldn’t get past the chimney and was stuck. It was up to his abandoned troop to go downstairs and surrender themselves; awaiting their punishment with hanging heads of defeat.
My mother never told me that when she tried to run away ten years later, she succeeded. She’d always said that she left home at 18, and I never thought to question it. I knew that she would have left behind a world of responsibility: working in the family shop, looking after her seven brothers and sisters, cooking and cleaning every day as well as keeping on top of her school work. I didn’t know she’d disappeared to find her freedom – I thought she’d been able to leave of her own free will.
It turns out she’d been faced with two options: become a lawyer or have an arranged marriage. She didn’t much like the sound of either and decided to click her heels. My mother tells me this with a grin on her face and a quiet chuckle, but I think she still feels pretty dreadful about it. Packing up your room and leaving nothing but a note saying “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be in touch,” sounds like something out of a film, where the kid comes home after a couple of days. My mother didn’t go back for six weeks. She was careful to visit the shop and not the house, and wouldn’t tell anyone where she was living.
She had good reason. A couple of years before, two of her older cousins Grinny and Nitsu had had the same idea, but they had run off with their boyfriends. The shame that such an act brought to a Greek Orthodox family enraged their father. He hunted them down and had their boyfriends hospitalised. Grinny and Nitsu had to be examined by a doctor and stitched up before being married off: “To make them virgins again,” my mother explains as I sit with my mouth gaping.
My mother, Mary Eleftheriou the young adult, the survivor, lived for 18 months with her family in Palmers Green and herself in an undisclosed location until she had no choice but to go home: her mother was ill. There were migraines, and then fits. Her mother had been given a brain scan but the doctors hadn’t been able to find anything wrong. Two months later they found a large tumor.
I never hear stories about my grandmother, if she is mentioned it’s with a great fondness: a soft voice and a faint smile on my mother’s face. From what I can tell she didn’t have the easiest of lives, she came to England from Cyprus to find work and was married to my grandfather by 17. It was an arranged marriage. She had eight children, but her daughter Helen died at the age of twelve from choking on a pen lid and she was left with seven. The few black and white pictures we have dotted around the house show me that she was very pretty, and I can see a striking resemblance between her and my aunt Lisa. They have the same height and build, and the same eyes.
The tumour was on a part of the brain that would have affected my grandmother’s speech, had it been operated on. This doesn’t appear to have been an option as it was growing very fast. It was also the ’70s, and “in those days doctors didn’t really tell you much,” my mother says. I think that my grandfather didn’t tell his children the extent of his wife’s illness and didn’t have the money to act on it either. There was probably a slight language barrier and nobody thought to talk to Lenny or my mother. I don’t know what really went on, this is the first time my mother has told me details of my grandmother’s illness, and it’s in broken speech, with long pauses.
I know she had to take a lot of medication, and that it made her very sleepy. My mother was looking after my grandmother the day she went into a coma, though she had no idea what had happened. “Mum’s been asleep all day,” she told her dad when he got home from the shop. He knew exactly what was going on and called an ambulance. My grandmother died in hospital a few days later.
My mother stayed at home for a while, to look after her dad and her brothers and sisters. They all dealt with it in different ways: apparently my grandfather wasn’t home very often and my youngest uncle Chris got appendicitis. My mother stayed as long as she could and then moved in with her boyfriend, Roger, before starting at Kingston Polytechnic. She didn’t run off or leave a note, she made sure they all knew exactly where she was going.
I was very moved by your writing. Engrossing.